Cosmic Salvation and the Moral Significance of Narrative

For it was fitting for the Creator of the universe, who by the economy of His incarnation became what by nature He was not, to preserve without change both what He Himself was by nature and what He became in His incarnation. For naturally we must not consider any change at all in God, nor conceive any movement in Him. Being changed properly pertains to movable creatures. This is the great and hidden mystery, at once the blessed end for which all things are ordained. It is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of created beings. In defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing. With a clear view to this end, God created the essences of created beings, and such is, properly speaking, the terminus of His providence and of the things under His providential care. Inasmuch as it leads to God, it is the recapitulation of the things He has created. It is the mystery which circumscribed all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God (cf. Eph. 1:10-11), a super-infinite plan infinitely preexisting the ages. The Logos, by essence God, became a messenger of this plan (cf. Is. 9:5, LXX) when He became a man and, if I may rightly say so, established Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which His creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.

Richard Adam’s novel Watership Down, a best-selling novel in the late 1970s about a warren of rabbits, inspired what is probably Hauerwas’s best exemplification of his claim about the moral significance of narrative for construing the Christian life. It is certainly his most extensive reading of a piece of fiction directed toward constructive reflection on the Christian life. Like the rabbits of Watership Down, Christians depend on a narrative to be guided and rely on a power of which the world knows not against those who would rule the world with violence. Furthermore, while Christians also often fail to be faithful to their guiding stories, this does not entail that the Christian story makes unrealistic demands. It does show the difficulty of being the kind of community where such a story can be told and embodied by a people formed in accordance with it and the challenge of developing skills to combat the tendency to self-deception that marks social life.

Watership Down is meant to teach us the importance of stories for social and political life. But even more important, by paying close attention to Watership Down we will see that the best way to learn the significance of stories is by having our attention drawn to stories through a story.

Watership Down is at once a first-class political novel and a marvelous adventure story. It is extremely important for my theses that neither aspect of the novel can be separated from the other. Too often politics is treated solely as a matter of power, interests, or technique. We thus forget that the most basic task of any polity is to offer its people a sense of participation in an adventure. For finally what we seek is not power, or security, or equality, or even dignity, but a sense of worth gained from participation and contribution to a common adventure. Indeed, our “dignity” derives exactly from our sense of having played a part in such a story.

The essential tie between politics and adventure not only requires recognition of the narrative nature of politics, but it also reminds us that good politics requires the development of courage and hope as central virtues for its citizens. As we will see, Watership Down is primarily a novel about the various forms of courage and hope necessary for the formation of a good community. Adventure requires courage to keep us faithful to the struggle, since by its very nature adventure means that the future is always in doubt. And just to the extent that the future is in doubt, hope is required, as there can be no adventure if we despair of our goal. Such hope does not necessarily take the form of excessive confidence; rather, it involves the simple willingness to take the next step.

It has to do with... atheists ain’t got no song. It’s very interesting. Could we be Christians if we couldn’t sing the faith. To sing the faith means that you are storied in a way that otherwise is impossible because you become part of God’s chorus. My way of putting these matters is: modernity names the time of trying to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they chose when they had no story. That’s called freedom. You should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story. And if you don’t believe that’s your story, I can illustrate it this way. Do you think you should be held responsible for decisions you made when you did not know what you were doing? No, you don’t think you should be held responsible for decisions you made when you did not know what you were doing. The only difficulty with that, of course, is that it makes marriage unintelligible because how could you have ever known what you were doing when you promised life-long monogamous fidelity. If it makes marriage unintelligible, try having children. You never get the ones you want. And of course the irony of “you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story” is that you didn’t choose that story. That “you didn’t choose that story helps you understand”—that’s world. Christians are a people who believe that we were storied. We didn’t choose the story. We’re creatures of a good God who gave us something to do, to witness to the glory of God through the cross and resurrection of Christ. Now that cross and resurrection stories the world and us. And that is constantly repeated in the liturgies we have as Christians.

If that’s true, they just discover me reading Barth and Barth reading the Gospels. That’s what’s discovered.